On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 08:19:49AM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote: > I think there are no people who explicitly think so. However, how > do you think if a developer think, for example, italic character > support for 8bit characters is very important while he/she don't > won't understand importance of multibyte support?
I believe this is perfectly understandable and normal, even though it's very annoying to Japanese users. A side-effect of open source is people prioritizing features that they care about at the expense of those they don't. English-speaking programmers are bound to care more about features for English than features for other languages--just as programmers in X care more about X support than Windows support (which is very annoying to Windows users, who often end up with old, buggy ports of X software when they get them at all). The only things that can be done about this are what's being done and discussed: making it easier (so the time commitment is reduced) and submitting patches. Actually, there's one more: give them a reason to care. I wonder if there's any way to sneak a few double-width characters into common use among English-speaking programmers. :) This is actually one advantage of NFD: it makes combining support much more important. (At least, it's an advantage from this perspective; those who would have to implement combining who wouldn't otherwise probably wouldn't see it that way.) By the way, I just gave lv a try: apt-get installed it, used it on a UTF-8 textfile containing Japanese, and I'm seeing garbage. It looks like it's stripping off the high bits of each byte and printing it as ASCII. I had to play around with switches to get it to display; apparently it ignores the locale. Very poor. Less, on the other hand, displays it without having to play games. It has some problems with double-width characters, unfortunately. -- Glenn Maynard -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
